According to the News Literacy Project (2025), 82 percent of teens struggle to differentiate news from advertisements, opinions, and entertainment. Thirty-five percent say they barely read for fun anymore (Gallup & Walton Family Foundation, 2025) — and a dramatically growing number rely on AI programs to write for them (Sidoti, Park, & Gottfried, 2025).

Weakened reading skills and muted voices are not going to help our campers find happiness and success in work and life.

The great news is that, as camp leaders, we are uniquely positioned to help inspire our campers to rise above the current social trends. At WriCampia, we run a super-fun camp newsroom that fosters and promotes individual voice, belonging, joyful self-efficacy, and media literacy — all essential components of positive youth development (News Corp, Algorhythm, & Youth Inc., 2017).

Take Ayana, age 13, for example. In her first moments at camp, she held back tears as she discovered that she was one of the eight kids whose suitcases didn’t come off of the bus that morning. Over the next 24 hours, she watched her peers design and admire each other’s sleeping areas, politely thanked her counselors when they delivered her temporary sheets and toiletries, and tried her best to stay positive. Rumors spread fast around camp about what had led to the luggage mishap. The next morning, she joined our teen-run newsroom, and before we knew it, she was commiserating with older campers and pitching and writing a piece on the true story behind the missing luggage. Through this process, she interviewed Daniela, a 14-year-old who also was waiting for her luggage. Daniela helped Ayana make light of the situation and feel supported. The late luggage finally arrived that evening, but Ayana stayed invested in her story throughout camp, interviewing the camp directors along with Joey, the staff member who drove six hours to retrieve all of the luggage for the distraught campers.

The newsroom became one of Ayana’s treasured camp microcommunities. There she enjoyed a deep sense of belonging, especially because she was with other campers who more readily found their stride running around camp, interviewing people, and writing than through throwing a ball. She and her mixed-aged peers listened and contributed with ease to newsroom conversations about the positive core values of journalists in general, from curiosity, fairness, rigor, and honesty to commitment and resilience.

“Who identifies with these values and traits?” a staff member asks.

Everyone raises their hands. The newsroom writers leave the first meeting ready to reach the goals of the role of newspaper writing at camp: to engage, entertain, inform, memorialize, celebrate, and archive camp life.

Every year, new ideas from our campers and staff revitalize our newspaper. In 2024, Nell, one of our teen editors and writers, spearheaded a favorite new section: “The WriCampian Diaries,” where campers submit short camp memoirs that capture a moment in time at camp from stargazing to a poetic description of a counselor waving to campers from a golf cart. Another teen that summer, Maxanne, created The Daily WriCampian, enjoyed by over 100 campers each morning. Each year, newsroom reporters launch new surveys to campers and parse through the responses to declare emerging camp fashion trends, writing habits, favorite reads, and more. In 2025, Eunju, an alum who is now a puzzle professional, taught our campers how to construct daily logic puzzles and crosswords, “turning abstract critical-thinking skills into tangible artifacts,” as she put it, that appear in both the daily and yearly publications.

Each summer, our goal is to connect this exciting camp initiative to real-world developments in order to help raise our campers’ media literacy levels. We believe in camp’s transformative impact and take that to heart in all aspects of camp programming. This is why we have recently begun to show our journalist campers The Washington Post’s famous tagline: “Democracy Dies in Darkness” and ask them, “What on earth does this have to do with journalism?”

After discussing, they determine that the role of high-level journalism in a democracy is two-fold: to help cultivate an informed electorate and to hold those in power accountable to the public. As campers begin to understand how journalism serves as the backbone to a functioning free society, they become increasingly motivated to better discern journalism from propaganda or fabricated news sites.

Each year, these high-level conversations inspire a few of our oldest teens to learn to write and execute rigorous feature stories, reviews, and opinion pieces on books, movies, famous athletes, political candidates, and the effects of national policy changes and international events on the lives of our campers.

But it is truly the day-to-day culture of the newsroom that makes this camp elective such a camper hit. The campers walk into a room to find tables covered in newspapers and magazines. We ask them:

• “What publication sections do you see?”
• “What are your favorite sections? Why?”
• “Which sections do you think the rest of camp would enjoy?”
• “Which pieces have the best opening lines?”

Then the teens take the lead to begin to review what our own camp paper covers. They walk the newer campers through past issues and create a Google doc (or take out pen and paper) to make a list of newspaper sections together, based on years past. Finally, the campers share their own ideas, and new sections, and story ideas are added to the document.

The teen editors create a deadline schedule for each story and support the younger campers in reaching those deadlines. Some of them, young and old, “nerd out” on our “house style” and see that process as an essential and exciting part of crafting our own paper’s voice. They do this alongside design choices, which they own as well.

A highlight for all: the writers wear “press badges” so they may walk around camp as they research, interview campers and staff, and take photos. Thúy, one of our longtime newsroom writers, joined at age 13 and was at first hesitant to approach campers and staff who she didn’t know to interview them for articles. By the end of that summer, she confidently initiated interviews, ready with questions and excited for the discussion to flow in unexpected directions. This coming summer, as a 17-year-old CIT, she will be helping the youngest newsroom writers follow in her footsteps.

The newsroom, made up of about 18 campers, ages 9 to 17, meets every day for an elective period. The newsroom’s oldest members meet during two additional elective times each day. On the last Tuesday of camp, all of the teens who wish to, including their non-newsroom camp friends, stay up throughout the night with the newsroom adult staff to design, copyedit, and format the issue on Canva. The staff gives the issue a final read Wednesday morning and sends the issue to print that afternoon.

In less than two weeks, the camp newsroom will have published a 45-page, beautiful new issue that covers all of the happenings and events of camp that summer, along with features about local mysteries (like the missing luggage) and the impacts of political policies on the lives of our campers. The newsroom kids shout, “Extra, Extra!” as they hand out a copy to each camper and staff member on the last morning. Campers and staff excitedly sign each other’s copies — yearbook style — as they squeal reading through the stories. A few weeks after camp ends, we launch the online version (quarterlynews.writopialab.org).

Our newspaper program is a major activity at our two-week-long, annual sleepaway camp. While other overnight camps may already have packed schedules and only be able to devote a fraction of the time to journalism, our frameworks may still be helpful. If you’d like to start a news program at your camp, here are the nuts and bolts of adding a camp newspaper elective.

Step One: Creating a Mission Together

Choose your favorite newspaper mission statements, read them out loud with campers, and discuss them. We read The New York Times’ mission (2025): “We seek the truth and help people understand the world. This mission is rooted in our belief that great journalism has the power to make each reader’s life richer and more fulfilling, and all of society stronger and more just.” In 2021, after reviewing this together, an older camper named David wrote our camp’s newspaper’s mission, which we still use and review each year together (edited by adults):

To inform the Writopia, WriCampian, and broader youth communities about the leading issues of the day through entertaining, thoughtful, well-researched journalism.

Our Yearly WriCampian Values:

• Curiosity and inclusivity. We attempt to capture the stories of our diverse community to reflect a broad range of perspectives and insights.
• Respect. We treat all our readers and all subjects in our stories with the utmost respect.
• Excellence. We strive to deliver articles of the highest quality of accuracy to inform and entertain at the top level.
• Creativity. We hope to highlight and represent the creativity of the Writopia community in an adequate manner.

Step 2: Establish Best Practices

Stories should be relevant to campers, timely, and entertaining.

Writers should pursue truth and accuracy despite biases, striving toward objectivity.

Editors should direct news toward comprehensive and proportional coverage; the bigger the news, the longer the story.

Step 3: Enjoy Journalism’s Terms and Structures

While there is room for creativity, all news articles have a few elements in common. Help your campers keep readers engaged from the get-go and answer the question, “What is this article about?” right away by introducing the following terms on day two or three of the program:

Hook. The first line that “hooks” your reader in.

Lede. The sentence or short paragraph that tells your reader what the article is about. Often answers the who, what, when, where, and why questions. (It is spelled funny because journalists love their jargon!)

Angle. The most important, newest, or most interesting takeaway that the camper learned while reporting on a topic. For instance, an article is not just about soccer at camp, but it focuses on the novel insights and approach that the newest coach brings to camp.

Nutgraf. Another jargon-y phrase. Comes from “nutshell paragraph.” This is the one paragraph of context that catches your reader up to speed on the topic the article addresses. What do they need to know, in a nutshell, in order to understand the context and significance of this piece?

Source. Anywhere the journalist gathers information — an interview with a person, a survey, a journal article, or study. All news articles need sources, opinion pieces included.

Step 4: Explore Popular Types of Camp Articles

Camp Features

Feature pieces are long, in-depth stories that address bigger-picture issues or trends at camp and allow room for more storytelling. Hot tip: start the piece with a scene-setting anecdote, a question, or a provocative statement, and provide the “meat” in the middle.

Camp Profiles

Profiles are a type of feature story that celebrates a specific person.

Pick a new, exciting staff member or someone who is wildly interesting to most of camp.

When you interview them, go in with questions, but let the conversation flow naturally to different topics — asking follow-up questions that arise in the moment — so you can learn and discover new, fun, and fascinating details to share in your article.

Do a lot of research on them.

Start with a scene — capturing something very detailed and specific about the person — to give that sense that you’re bringing the reader into a super fun peek at their camp world.

Reviews

Reviews provide a summary, analysis, and recommendation to readers about anything from books and movies to special camp programs, events, trips, or other opportunities at camp. Reviews should pull the reader into the experience with strong sensory details, briefly summarize the plot or relevant details, analyze both the strengths and weaknesses of the subject, and end with an overall assessment of the work and recommendation for the reader.

Opinion Pieces

Opinion pieces express an opinion, backed by evidence, facts, and research, usually from an expert in the field. “But wait, I am 11!” a camper may fret. Rest assured, an 11-year-old camper is much more an expert on being a young camper than you or I. Campers can write from the point of view of their position as a young person, student, tennis player, a son or daughter, and hundreds of other perspectives. Our campers have written their opinions on how medication is disseminated at camp, bullying policies at their schools, if Marvel or DC movies should or shouldn’t have political undertones, and more. One of my favorite Writopia opinion pieces was written by a nationally ranked, 17-year-old debater who penned “Debate Shouldn’t Be About Winning an Argument” (Mazumdar, 2020).

The Work and the Perks

Yes, creating a publication at camp is a lot of work, but it’s also a lot of fun. Whether your campers work together to create a few one-page newsletters or a robust magazine, the endeavor requires curiosity, creativity, research, editing, design, tech or printing ability, and resources to do it right. This is why at our camp, we have decided to allot significant time to it, and a variety of rewards.

The newspaper team of campers, CITs, and staff meet throughout the day and across various elective periods. This crew is committed and they work hard, but they receive a few perks, such as:

• The grounding, deep sense of belonging to a tight-knit micro-community at camp — and one that comes with super-cute press badges that grant campers access to specific computers, staff, and campers throughout the day
• The inspiring and connecting experience of bonding with longtime mentors and mentees while learning the stories about what happens behind the scenes at camp
• The development of long-lasting writing skills, tools, and perspectives that increase chances of success and impact in the future
• The confidence earned from bylines on news stories that are shared with our camper and family community
• The joy of handing out the papers to campers and staff who have been eagerly awaiting the news of the season; the power of the act of contributing to a community

In the end, our newspaper writers each year choose to trade in a portion of their general camp time for the love of their newspaper publishing project.

They do it for so many reasons. For the satisfaction of giving voice to the interesting developments they were curious about at camp. To learn meaningful insights into both camp and the broader world.

And for the love of their summer camp community.

References

Gallup & Walton Family Foundation. (2025). Walton Family Foundation Gen Z Research. gallup.com/analytics/651674/gen-z-research.aspx

Mazumdar, A. (2020, July 8). Dissenting opinion: Scholastic debate shouldn’t be about winning an argument. The Writopia Lab Quarterly News. quarterlynews.writopialab.org/2020/07/08/dissenting-opinion-scholastic-debate-shouldnt-be-about-winning-an-argument-by-arjun-mazumdar-17

News Corp, Algorhythm, & Youth Inc. (2017). The art & science of creating effective youth programs. search.issuelab.org/resource/the-art-science-of-creating-effective-youth-programs.html

News Literacy Project. (2025, August 5). Report: News literacy in America. newslit.org/news-and-research/news-literacy-in-america

New York Times. (2025). Mission and values. nytco.com/mission-and-values

Sidoti, O., Park, E., & Gottfried, J. (2025, January 15). About a quarter of US teens have used ChatGPT for schoolwork — Double the share in 2023. Pew Research Center. pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/15/about-a-quarter-of-us-teens-have-used-chatgpt-for-schoolwork-double-the-share-in-2023

Rebecca Wallace-Segall founded Writopia (writopialab.org) in 2007 and WriCampia (writopialab.org/programs/what-we-do/sleepaway-camps/wricampiain) 2013. She shared the founding story in The Village Voice (villagevoice.com/writopia-gets-kids-to-tell-their-stories), and writes about the need for creative writing in our schools and in the after-school space, “How to Love Writing for High School and College Admittance,” and more.